Village Books

With my tendency to contemplate, it is no wonder that this month, my mind travels to retirement. No, I’m not old. I promise you that I’m as young as the spry teenager who climbed trees to write. I’m still the girl who stared at an ant hill for hours watching male ant-workers carry pieces of food to an ever-rising hole.

I don’t know when it happened that I knew I was ready to let go of my restaurant. Fourteen years is just a drop in the bucket of careers. Few knew me when I was the weekend manager of a CVS pharmacy in Brookline, Massachusetts. I had my pink duster ready to go as I stocked the shelves. Robbed at gunpoint, I testified in court. The man saw my face and I looked him in the eye, never realizing he’d get off because in another robbery someone died, and the prosecutor chose to forfeit my case in order to pursue the higher penalty. Somehow, the robber got out on bail.

All experiences lead you somewhere. I volunteered in the Boston prison system in college, until I decided that my heart hurt too much to be effective. Prisoners on leave calling me when they were out, kept me up at night. It doesn’t mean that I feared, but it did mean that to be effective I needed to revisit my skill set. I knew I couldn’t close off my heart.

Abbe details the process of bringing a book into the world. Course covers the inception of an idea, defining genre, understanding editing, and revision, creating compelling covers, to marketing and distribution. Standards set by the[...]